Saturday, September 6, 2008

Buy a stealth bomber for each panda

For the price of the Iraq War, we could've bought each of the world's pandas their own stealth bomber.

Using the highest estimates, there are 3000 giant pandas in the wild, and 266 in captivity. The unit cost of the stealth bomber (at the prices that the US government was initially quoted when a larger order of bombers was planned) is $737 million each. Equipping every giant panda with their own stealth bomber would cost $2.4 trillion, which is less than Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes' estimate of $3 trillion for the cost of the Iraq War.

5 comments:

One post I would be really interested to see would be how much you could do with solar panels for 3 trillion. Maybe how much roof space, or how many homes, or what percent of national consumption could be supplied with $3,000,000,000,000 in solar panels.